The 1962 film version seems to opt for a more sci-fi / horror angle at the expense of Wyndham’s story with its backdrop Cold War considerations and fears along with philosophical discussions of the nature of human civilisation.
John Wyndham’s classic science fiction story opens with a man called Bill waking up in a hospital room to find the world he once knew utterly transformed - a world gone blind overnight!
The opening chapter contains an atmosphere of dread as Bill senses without the aid of his sight that the outside world sounds more like a quiet Sunday rather than a typical Wednesday. There is an overwhelming feeling of something not at all being quite right.
With only his sense of hearing to guide him, the striking of the clock indicates that it is now nine o’clock. However, the time his bandages were supposed to be removed was at eight – what on earth has been happening in the meantime?
Unknown to Bill, while he had been asleep after his eye operation, a cosmic event caused the majority of the population who witnessed it to go blind.
Added to the horror of mass blindness is the danger posed to humanity in the form of a plant known as a triffid.
Humanity in its complacency, however did not count on a cosmic event causing global mass blindness and providing the triffids with an opportunity to escape their confinement and become THE apex predator with human beings becoming their prey. For the triffids you see, cannot see but are drawn to noise and therefore their prey cannot avoid them for long!
What of are some of the changes and differences between the book and the movie?
Wyndham’s
Novel
|
Sekely’s
1962 Film Version
|
| The triffids had been contained and were farmed to produce a vegetable oil substitute and help to ease the global food supply problem. |
The light show of the meteor
shower has caused the triffids and the plants have somehow been
mutated by the event.
|
Bill is a biologist and triffid
expert who had been hit by a triffid.
|
Bill is a merchant navy officer,
who missed the meteor shower because he was in hospital with his
eyes bandaged after an operation
|
Central female character is part of
the important love story.
|
Central female character reduced
to screaming damsel in distress.
|
Josella is saved by Bill from being
beaten in the middle of the street.
-Modern
woman for the times.
-Unmarried
by choice.
-Author
of ‘Sex Is My Adventure.'
-Gained
a notorious ‘reputation.’
-Self-reliant
Appearance
of Susan later in the story.
|
No Josella! Just a screaming
biologist, Karen!
|
Crowd panic, chaos in the
streets with loss of sight and reason. Few traffic accidents due
to suddeness of blindness overnight.
|
Car and bus crashes and wreckage
along with train and pane crashes.
|
Greater sense of isolation and no
communication with the rest of the world.
|
Bill hops across to France and Spain
and radios seem to still function
|
Coker kidnaps Bill and Josella
to help with his plan to look after and feed the blind. His plan
falls apart when a sickness starts killing off people in London.
|
Coker is a British tourist in
France.
|
What individuals and a society will do and the choices that are made in the face of a calamity is a central feature of Wyndham’s story. So too is the question of the value of our cherished moral and social belief systems when put to the test by the sheer necessity of survival. Placed along side Windham’s novel, the film version is little more than a disappointing monster movie with ordinary special effects and little substance. Of greater interest are the subsequent TV mini-series versions and their respective treatments of Wyndham’s story.
***************
I'll try not to knock over any statues or monuments on my way by being dragged along by swirling currents in a sea of slogans spewing out of mindless moronic mob mouths whose sense and knowledge of history extends as far back as this morning's breakfast. I may need, however to dodge any microbial passengers that have hitched a ride on them!
©Chris Christopoulos 2020
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